A few days ago, the 2nd beta of IE8 was released. Although I haven’t had much time to play with it and find out what it does and doesn’t support, I have come across a few bugs with it.

But one of the big problems we still have with IE is the inability to run several versions side by side. The one solution continually offered by Microsoft is the ability to download virtual machines, which are set to expire after a limited amount of time. The problem with this is that you still need a separate virtual machine for each version of IE you want to run, and after they expire, you need to get a new one.

Anyway, I have a found an even better solution. One that lets me run IE6, IE7, IE8b1 and IE8b2 side by side, all within the same copy of Windows XP, which I also have running in a single virtual machine on Mac OS X. I don’t have time to elaborate on the solution now, but I will try to do so over the next few days. For now, here’s a screenshot showing them all running together, with each demonstrating how badly they fail Acid 3.